TRANSCRIPT:
Good afternoon, and happy feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.
This week I’ve been thinking about unity with the Divine Will, and we all know that that’s only really possible through detachment from things of this world. But it also means detachment from internal things. So, it’s not just material goods- my truck, my car, my house, my golf clubs, whatever. It’s also detachment from internal things. And that means our passions, the things that we love, we enjoy, but also our preferences, and that can manifest itself in many ways.
And I’ve also often thought about our spiritual life as sort of a chalice, right? We have been given this beautiful chalice by God: our soul. And it’s our job to keep it clean and to enlarge it through corporal works of mercy, spiritual works of mercy, prayer, fasting, penance, but also to keep it full of the grace that God bestows on us, because he’s pouring out more grace on us every moment of the day than we could ever imagine.
And so, we want to enlarge that chalice and we want it to be full. And when we sin, of course, it’s like we’re dumping everything out and we’re filling it up with muck. But it occurred to me this last week, thinking about detachment, that it’s not just a question about keeping it free of filth, but it’s also keeping it free of all sorts of other things. All of those attachments that we have to the things of this world, whether it’s a love for food or drink or things that are by themselves not sinful, but that we become attached to. It could be human respect, it could be getting our way, it could be having people treat us the way we always want to be treated.
Whatever that attachment is, it’s like when you see those science experiments where they fill up a glass or vase with rocks, and then they fill it up with gravel, and then they fill it up with sand, and you keep putting more and more in, and then finally you’re able to pour a little bit of water into that chalice. But it’s a tiny amount of water compared to what it would be if it were just free of all of those external things.
So I’ve begun looking at myself and saying, “I want to get all those big rocks, all that little gravel, all of that sand that, yeah, I’ve crammed it in there, but I want to get it out so that there’s more room for the grace of God, so that I have more capacity to absorb what it is that He’s trying to send me.”
Maybe you’ll laugh at this, maybe it’s a simplistic sort of thing, but it’s a visual that’s really helped me to understand the degree to which my attachment to things of this world- even my own preferences for things that are not necessarily evil- poses an obstacle in my relationship with God. Have a great day.